Gmail logo designed night before launch

The famous Gmail logo was designed the night before the email product launched, according to a post on Quora, the question-and-answer service popular in Silicon Valley.

Kevin Fox, a former designer for Google, said Dennis Hwang designed the logo in the wee hours before the 2004 launch of the popular e-mail service, which Google claims now has 350 million active users.

“The logo was designed literally the night before the product launched. We were up very late and Sergey (Brin) and I went down to his cube to watch him make it,” Fox wrote.

This brief tidbit of information further underscores the different cultures of Google and Apple. At Apple, managers are known to obsess for months over the font for a specific application. Meanwhile at Google, logos are designed in a darkened cubicle the hours before a product is scheduled to launch.